DOA estimation for mixed uncorrelated and coherent sources in multipath environment

Abstract

A novel direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation method is proposed to cope with the scenario where a number of uncorrelated and coherent narrowband sources simultaneously impinge on the far-field of a uniform linear array (ULA). In the proposed method, the DOAs of uncorrelated sources are firstly estimated by utilizing the property of the moduli of eigenvalues of the DOA matrix. Afterwards, the contributions of uncorrelated sources and the interference of noise are eliminated completely by exploiting the improved spatial differencing technique and only the coherent components remain in the spatial differencing matrix. Finally, the remaining coherent sources can be resolved by performing the improved spatial smoothing scheme on the spatial differencing matrix. The presented method can resolve more number of sources than that of the array elements and distinguish the uncorrelated and coherent sources that come from the same direction as well as improving the estimation performance. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.